The Signature of All Things (42 page)

At last, she looked up to his face, desperate to find some opening, some conduit, into him. He appeared frozen in fear. Why
fear
? She dropped to the floor beside the bathtub. It almost looked as though she were kneeling before him in supplication. No—she
was
kneeling before him in
supplication. His right hand, with its long and tapered fingers, was resting on the edge of the tub, clutching at the porcelain rim. She loosened this hand, one finger at a time. He allowed her to loosen it. She took his hand and brought it toward her mouth. She put three of his fingers in her mouth. She could not help herself. She needed something of him inside her. She wanted to bite down on him, just enough to keep his fingers from slipping out of her mouth. She did not wish to frighten him, but she did not wish to let him go, either. Instead of biting down, she began to suck. She was perfectly concentrated in her yearning. Her lips made a noise—a rude sort of wet noise.

At that, Ambrose came alive. He gasped, and yanked his fingers from her mouth. He sat up quickly, making a loud splash, and covered his genitals with both his hands. He looked as though he were going to die of terror.

“Please—” she said.

They stared at each other, like a woman and a bedchamber intruder—but she was the intruder, and he was the terrified quarry. He stared at her as though she were a stranger who had put a knife to his throat, as though she intended to use him for the most evil pleasures, then sever his head, carve out his bowels, and eat his heart with a long, sharpened fork.

Alma relented. What other choice did she have? She stood and walked slowly from the water closet, gently pulling the door closed behind her. She dressed again. She walked downstairs. Her heart was so broken that she did not know how it was possible she could still be alive.

She found Hanneke de Groot sweeping the corners of the dining room. With a clenched voice, she requested that the housekeeper please make up the guest bedroom in the east wing for Mr. Pike, who would be sleeping there from now on, until other arrangements could be made.

“
Waarom
?” Hanneke asked.

But Alma could not tell her why. She was tempted to fall into Hanneke’s arms and weep, but resisted it.

“Is there any harm in an old woman’s question?” Hanneke asked.

“You will please inform Mr. Pike yourself of this new arrangement,” Alma said, and walked away. “I find myself unable to tell him.”

A
lma slept on her divan in the carriage house that night, and did not take dinner. She thought of Hippocrates, who believed that the ventricles of the
heart were not pumps for blood, but for air. He believed the heart was an extension of the lungs—a sort of great, muscular bellows, which fed the furnace of the body. Tonight, Alma felt as if it were true. She could feel a huge gushing and sucking of wind inside her chest. It felt as though her heart was gasping for air. As for her lungs, they seemed full of blood. She was drowning with every breath. She could not shake this sense of drowning. She felt mad. She felt like crazed little Retta Snow, who also used to sleep on this couch, when the world became too frightening.

In the morning, Ambrose came to find her. He was pale and his face was contorted with pain. He sat beside her, and reached for her hands. She pulled them away. He stared at her for a long while without speaking.

“If you are trying to communicate something to me silently, Ambrose,” she said at last, in a voice tight with anger, “I will be unable to hear it. I ask that you speak to me directly. Do me that courtesy, please.”

“Forgive me,” he said.

“You must tell me what I am to forgive you
for
.”

He struggled. “This marriage . . .” he began, and then lost his words.

She laughed a hollow laugh. “What is a marriage, Ambrose, when it is cheated of the honest pleasures any husband and wife could rightly expect?”

He nodded. He looked hopeless.

“You have misled me,” she said.

“Yet I believed we understood each other.”

“Did you? What did you believe was understood? Tell me in words: What did you think our marriage would be?”

He searched for an answer. “An exchange,” he finally said.

“Of what, exactly?”

“Of love. Of ideas and comfort.”

“As did I, Ambrose. But I thought there might be other exchanges as well. If you wished to live like a Shaker, why did you not run off and join them?”

He looked at her, baffled. He had no idea what a Shaker was. Lord, there was so much this boy did not know!

“Let us not dispute each other, Alma, or stand in conflict,” he begged.

“Is it the dead girl whom you long for? Is that the problem?”

Again, the baffled expression.

“The dead girl, Ambrose,” she repeated. “The one your mother told me of. The one who died in Framingham years ago. The one you loved.”

He could not have been more perplexed. “You spoke to my mother?”

“She wrote me a letter. She told me of the girl—of your true love.”

“My mother wrote you a letter? About Julia?” Ambrose’s face was swimming in bewilderment. “But I never loved Julia, Alma. She was a dear child and the friend of my youth, but I never loved her. My mother may have wished me to love her, for she was the daughter of an upstanding family, but Julia was nothing more than my innocent neighbor. We drew flowers together. She had a small genius for it. She was dead at the age of fourteen. I have scarcely thought of her these many years. Why on earth are we speaking of Julia?”

“Why can you not love me?” Alma asked, hating the desperation in her voice.

“I could not love you
more
,” Ambrose said, with desperation to match her own.

“I am ugly, Ambrose. I have never been unaware of that fact. Also, I am old. Yet I am in possession of several things that you wanted—comforts, companionship. You could have had all those things without humiliating me through marriage. I had already given you those things, and would have given them to you forever. I was content to love you like a sister, perhaps even like a mother. But
you
were the one who wished to wed. You were the one who introduced to me the idea of matrimony. You were the one who said that you wanted to sleep next to me every night. You were the one who allowed me to long for things that I long ago overcame desiring.”

She had to stop speaking. Her voice was rising and cracking. This was shame upon shame.

“I have no need of wealth,” Ambrose said, his eyes wet with sorrow. “You know this of me.”

“Yet you are reaping its benefits.”

“You do not understand me, Alma.”

“I do not understand you at all, Mr. Pike. Edify me.”

“I asked you,” he said. “I asked you if you wanted a marriage of the soul—a
mariage blanc
.” When she did not immediately answer, he said, “It means a chaste marriage, without exchange of flesh.”

“I know what a
mariage blanc
is, Ambrose,” she snapped. “I was speaking French before you were born. What I fail to understand is why you would imagine that I wanted one.”

“Because I asked you. I asked if you would accept this of me, and you agreed.”

“
When?
” Alma felt that she would tear his hair straight out of his scalp if he did not speak more directly, more truthfully.

“In your book-repair closet that night, after I found you in the library. When we sat in silence together. I asked you, silently, ‘Will you accept this of me?’ and you said, ‘yes.’ I
heard
you say yes. I felt you say it! Do not deny it, Alma—you heard my question across the divide, and you answered me in the affirmative! Is that not true?”

He was staring at her with panicked eyes. Now she was struck dumb.

“And you asked me a question, too,” Ambrose went on. “You asked me silently if this is what I wanted of you. I said yes, Alma! I believe I even said it aloud! I could not have answered more clearly! You heard me say it!”

She cast her mind back to that night in the binding closet, to her silent detonation of sexual pleasure, to the sensation of his question running through her, and of her question running through him.
What had she heard?
She had heard him ask, clear as a ringing church bell, “Will you accept this of me?” Of course she had said yes. She thought he had meant, “Will you accept sensual pleasures such as this from me?” When she had asked in reply, “Is this what you want of me?” she had meant, “Do you want these sensual pleasures with me?”

Dear Lord in heaven, they had misunderstood each other’s questions! They had
supernaturally
misunderstood each other’s questions. It had been the one and only categorical miracle of Alma Whittaker’s life, and she had misunderstood it. This was the worst jest she had ever heard.

“I was only asking you,” she said wearily, “if you wanted
me
. Which is to say—if you wanted me
fully
, in the way that lovers typically want each other. I thought you were asking me the same.”

“But I would never ask for anyone’s corporeal body in the manner of which you speak,” Ambrose said.

“Why ever not?”

“Because I do not believe in it.”

Alma could not comprehend what she was hearing. She was unable to speak for a long while. Then she asked, “Is it your opinion that the conjugal act—even between a man and his wife—is something vile and depraved? Surely you know, Ambrose, what other people share with each other, in the privacy of marriage? Do you think me debased, for wanting my husband to be a husband? Surely you have heard tales of such enjoyments between men and women?”

“I am not like other men, Alma. Can that honestly surprise you to learn, at this late date?”

“What do you imagine you are, then, if not like other men?”

“It is not what I imagine I am, Alma—it is what I wish to be. Or rather, what I once was, and wish to be again.”

“Which is what, Ambrose?”

“An angel of God,” Ambrose said, in a voice of unspeakable sadness. “I had hoped we could be angels of God together. Such a thing would not be possible unless we were freed of the flesh, bound in celestial grace.”

“Oh, for the godforsaken mercy of the twice-buggered mother of
Christ
!” Alma cursed. She wanted to pick him up and shake him, as she’d shaken Robert the garden boy the other day. She wanted to argue scripture with him. The women of Sodom, she wanted to tell him, had been punished by Jehovah for having sexual communion with angels—
but at least they had gotten their chance!
Just her luck, to have been sent an angel so beautiful, yet so uncomplying.

“Come, Ambrose!” she said. “Awaken yourself! We do not live in the celestial realm—not you, and most certainly not I. How can you be so dim? Put your eyes upon me, child! Your real eyes—your mortal eyes. Do I look like an angel to you, Ambrose Pike?”

“Yes,” he said, with sad simplicity.

The rage passed out of Alma, and was replaced by leaden, bottomless sorrow.

“Then you have been much mistaken,” Alma said, “and now we find ourselves in a deuce of a mess.”

H
e could not stay on at White Acre.

This became evident after only a week had passed—a week during which Ambrose slept in the guest chambers in the east wing, and Alma slept on the divan in the carriage house, both of them enduring the grins and titters of the young maids. To be wed only a few weeks and already sleeping not only in different rooms, but in different
buildings
 . . . well, this was far too glorious a scandal for the busybodies about the estate to resist.

Hanneke tried to keep the staff silent, but the rumors dipped and flew like bats at twilight. They said that Alma was too old and ugly for Ambrose to endure, regardless of the fortune that came tucked inside her dried-up
cunny. They said that Ambrose had been caught stealing. They said that Ambrose liked the pretty young girls, and that he had been found with his hand on the arse of a dairymaid. They said whatever they wanted to say; Hanneke could not dismiss everyone. Alma overheard some of it herself, and what she did not overhear, she could easily imagine. The looks they gave her were despicable enough.

Her father called her into his study on a Monday afternoon in late October.

“What is this, then?” he said. “Bored of your new toy already?”

“Do not ridicule me, Father—I swear to you, I cannot bear it.”

“Then make an explanation to me.”

“It is too shameful to explain.”

“I cannot imagine that to be true. Do you fancy that I have not heard the bulk of rumors already? Nothing you could tell me would be more shameful than what people are already saying.”

“There is much that I cannot tell you, Father.”

“Has he been untrue to you?
Already?
”

“You know him, Father. He would not do that.”

“None of us much know him, Alma. So what is it? Stolen from you—from
me
? Is he rutting you half to death? Beating you with a leather strop? No, somehow I cannot see any of that. Put a name to it, girl. What is his crime?”

“He cannot stay here any longer, and I cannot tell you why.”

“Do you take me for a specimen of man who would faint at the truth? I am old, Alma, but not yet entombed. And don’t think I will not guess it, either, if I go at the question long enough. Are you frigid? Is that the trouble? Or does he hang limp?”

She did not reply.

“Ah,” he said. “Something like that, then. So there has been no settlement of the marital duties?”

Again, she did not reply.

Henry clapped his hands. “Well, what of it? You enjoy each other’s companionship, regardless. That’s more than most people are allotted in their marriages. You are too old to bear children, anyway, and many marriages are not happy in the bedchamber. Most of them, really. Poorly matched pairings are thick as flies in this world. Your marriage may have soured
faster than others, but you will bear up and endure it, Alma, like the rest of us do—or did. Haven’t you been raised to bear up and endure things? You will not have your life felled by one setback. Make the best of it. Think of him as a brother, if he does not tickle you under the coverlets to your satisfaction. He would make a good enough brother. He is pleasant company to us all.”